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April 17, 2019 05:31 pm PDT

What it's like to watch someone you love fall down the Fox News rabbit-hole

Luke O'Neil put a call out for his readers' stories of their loved ones' capture by Fox News, being overtake by its paranoid, racist conspiracy mindset: he got back a heartbreaking collection of tales of "funny, compassionate" older relatives turning into someone who was "increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid" -- some people even found their older relatives dead in front of a TV playing Fox.

The stories mostly involve people who saw themselves as "conservative" but who kept any kind of racial animus or other socially unacceptable views to themselves, but whose conservative worldviews were deepened and weaponized, in part by sprawling and aggressive direct-mail ad campaigns for quack remedies, prepper supplies, gold bullion, and so on.

Many of the people transformed by Fox seemed to begin their transformation in 2008, with the election of America's first Black president, and at the dawn of the financial crisis, when the slow upward redistribution of America's wealth to the 1% took a precipitous leap.

The cause-and-effect here is difficult to nail down. There's racism, there's precarity, there's propaganda, all in the mix together. My view is that people are mixed bags with different proclivities, biases, and vices, but that trauma and anxiety create vulnerability, and that vulnerability can be weaponized by propagandists.

Dozens who responded to my piece talked about the sad lonely twilight of their parents or grandparents lives, having been spurned by, or having disowned much of their families over political disagreements. Older people, recent studies have shown, are much more likely to share misleading information online, but the anecdotes I was hearing seemed to indicate this behavior wasnt limited to the internet.

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